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Overview

GitHub is a service for version control, primarily used for software development. Here in the MIT Communication Lab, we are using Github to host our resources in one, centralized location. This also allows for our fellows to add and edit resources over time.

If you are new to GitHub, this is a short guide to navigate GitHub and access the resources we have.

If you are familiar with GitHub, this may be too basic for you – feel free to use this repository as you see fit.

GitHub Repository Walkthrough

First, a repository is basically a folder, just like the folders on your computer. GitHub uses a lot of specialized vocabulary. Even GitHub recognizes this and created a glossary to help users understand what branching, forking, pulling, pushing, cloning, and so on means. For our purposes, we just need to know what a repository is and how to clone it (to make a copy of it).

  1. When navigating to this repository, you ended up at the repository main page. This page provides a short description and automatically displays the README.md file, which includes our compiled list of resources. These are active links, indexed by a table of contents. Some links will bring you to other websites, whereas others may bring you to folders or files within this repository.

  2. Any files can be downloaded directly from the repository by clicking through the folders and files at the top. After clicking on a file, GitHub will attempt to show you a preview if it can. Otherwise, you can click the Download button in the top right corner.

  3. To download the entire repository, you can navigate to the repository main page and click the green Clone or Download button, then click Download Zip.

  4. But, this is against standard GitHub practice. The typical way to download a user's repository is through cloning. Cloning allows you to maintain an updated copy of this repository by pulling (updating) it. If you are interested in learning GitHub, one way to get started is following this tutorial from HubSpot. Afterwards, you can check out the documentation on cloning a repository.

  5. Lastly, you can open up Issues by navigating to the Issues tab on the repository main page and clicking New Issue. A Communication Fellow will respond promptly to any issue you may have using the resources provided here.